Organically enlarged with fair-faced concrete
Roth House in Muri by Camponovo Baumgartner
© Peter Tillessen / Archphot
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Rich in contrast on the exterior, featuring a seamless transitions indoors: in Muri, Switzerland, the historical Roth House – now a residential home for the disabled – has gained a striking extension in fair-faced concrete.
© Peter Tillessen / Archphot
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The two volumes are located on the south-east corner of the former Benedictine monastery, to this day one of the most important cultural monuments in the canton of Aargau west of Zurich. The historical monastery wings are used by the municipal administration on the one hand and by a retirement and nursing home on the other.
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The Roth House itself can also look back on an eventful past: built in the 17th century, it has served over the course of the years as a granary, a retail establishment, a stagecoach station, a residential building complete with a butcher’s shop, and a bank branch. In 1906 it gained a Neoclassical Wilhelminian facade in red, giving rise to its present-day name. It was purchased in the nineties by a foundation of the same name with the goal of turning it into a home for the disabled. At the time the old structure was completely gutted and new storey slabs solely supported by four inner columns on concrete were installed in its interior.
© Peter Tillessen / Archphot
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During the recent renovation and extension work by Camponovo Baumgartner, the flexibility of the supporting structure proved to be highly advantageous. Two goals in particular determined the Zurich architects’ design: what was now to be a two-part complex was to trace the course of the former monastery wall, and a generously-dimensioned seamless transition between old and new was to be created in the interior.
© Peter Tillessen / Archphot
© Peter Tillessen / Archphot
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The architects had the Roth House pared back once again to its supporting structure and redesigned the floor plans. It is here that the bedrooms are accommodated. The common spaces for the four residential groups are concentrated in the exposed concrete extension, given the form of a rectilinear gable-roofed house with a dust-pan dormer at the north, west and south, and adjoined at the east by a tapered connecting wing to the gable of the Roth House.
© Peter Tillessen / Archphot
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Inside the two volumes, the architects managed to eliminate not only visual but also physical barriers between old and new by seamlessly continuing the curved corridor wall of the residential section into the façade of the extension. Lime plaster walls and strip parquet flooring soon allow the raw exposed concrete aesthetics to be forgotten, but solely at the stairwell and the recessed loggias at the north-west corner.
Architecture: Camponovo Baumgartner Architekten
Client: Stiftung Roth-Haus Muri
Location: Aarauerstrasse 11, 5630 Muri (CH)
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